Magento Live Australia is the largest Magento conference in the APAC region and year after year, since 2013, it has attracted more and more attendees from this region.
Of course, Lero9 as one of New Zealand’s leading Magento Partners, have been attending this event since inauguration. The event is held at the Hilton Sydney which is a great venue with good conference facilities and fabulous catering, in the heart of the CBD and close to Darling Harbour.
This year we went with a strong feeling of anticipation regarding the overall community feedback about Magento 2 which was officially launched at last year’s Magento Live 2015. Magento 2 has presented us with a fair share of challenges this year and this sentiment seems to have been shared among most of the partners. However, it was good to see Magento’s response and a reassurance from the leadership that there is a strong commitment to resolve the platform issues as a priority and to continue offering new and exciting features and additional services.
So let’s review the highlights we came away with.
Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition
One of the first presentations at Magento Live was the session about the Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition. The session was facilitated by Doug McIver, Sr. Director of Product Management and featured a case study of the re-platforming of fashion retailer Oliver Sweeney onto the Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition by Magento partner Redbox Digital.
The Magento Cloud Edition product was launched at Magento Imagine in April 2016 and bundles a modern technology stack together with an Enterprise version of Magento and offers it as a PaaS. Its tech stack is based on:
Amazon Web Services
platform.sh – Continuous Integration / Rapid Deployment Tools / Dev Lifecycle Management
Magento Enterprise Edition 2.x
Performance Management Tools: New Relic and Blackfire
CDN: Fastly
From a developer point of view, this setup is quite streamlined and alleviates the solution integrator (SI) from a DevOps heavy team, allowing focus on development, in theory. In reality, the cloud product did add some gains in the development lifecycle and managed to deliver a solid experience. Most gains were achieved when the project needed to be branched off to trial a new feature, the cloud management allowed for easy replication of the master development environment into a clone ensuring the same infrastructure is present for development and testing. Other gains are in the deployment where the product automatically builds the Magento 2 assets when code is deployed.
Magento Analytics
Magento Analytics is Magento’s newest acquisition of the RJ Metrics Analytics product. It promises to give you as a merchant a full 360 degree view of all your pertinent eCommerce data. You can import data from a variety of sources and of course it is closely linked to your Magento store and Google Analytics. This allows you to mine your sales and customer information across all your sales channels thus delivering a truly omni-channel view of your commerce data.
Magento Order Management System – OMS
Order management is becoming a significant element in the ever growing ERP chain as it is at the heart of a unified, customer centric fulfilment strategy. Magento’s OMS provides the tools to coordinate your customers’ experience across all sales and fulfilment channels. It gathers information from each touchpoint, orchestrating and optimising based on rules and processes. It also provides inventory management, Payments and Risk, and reporting and analytics. As the solution is modular, it gives you the flexibility to implement as a fully integrated solution or add modules as you grow. We will certainly be keeping an eye on this product as it develops over time.
Magento 2 Development
Magento Live Sydney 2016 was certainly a good event to take stock of how the first year of Magento 2 has panned out for the solution and technology partners and merchants. While there are teething issues as with any new software, the overall sentiment is a positive one and we were pleased to see the Magento leadership team being dedicated to ensuring the platform’s success as well as resolving the current issues and moving forward with new and exciting features.
There has been a heavy emphasis on Magento 2 for B2B and we will soon see a specific Magento B2B product being released. Currently, this is in alpha.
From a developer’s perspective, Alan Kent delivered an interesting session about the efforts that are being made to provide a streamlined development stack for Magento 2 development. Work is under way to offer Docker and Vagrant based development environments ready to run Magento 2. There are numerous community projects offering tools and tips on how to tackle the development and deployment tasks. This session has reminded us once again how the #realmagento community works to explore the platform and disseminate tools and knowledge and is the backbone of the success of Magento.
Final Notes
In other Magento news, we heard that Roy Rubin, the former Magento CEO and founder has joined the Magento board in October 2016. Another exciting bit of info is that the Magento 2 U training courses are going to be offered for free from the 1. December 2016 till the 15. January 2017 so enrol while it’s free and get your M2 klout.
Apart from the session content, there was plenty to do at the conference. For us, it’s always a balance between attending sessions and networking with industry peers and partners as well as Magento folk. Time in the breaks just seems to go by very quickly. It was great to catch up with Tony from Moustache Republic, Karen from ShipperHQ, the guys from StarShipIT and the Redbox Digital guys. We clearly bumped into Kristof from Fooman as well as our clients Healthpost and a couple of Magento guys from Auckland, Craig and Baskar.
Fun
As is usual, Magento always puts up a great networking party and this time it was no exception. After a hard day’s work attending sessions and talking to people, we strolled to Darling Harbour to Café Del Mar where we were greeted with drinks and great food as well as a ‘racing’ theme with a model racetrack and a couple of racing simulators which proved hard to get a spot for. The event was put on by Fastly, one of the conference sponsors and provider of CDN services. The view of Darling Harbour was awesome and the evening warm and buzzy with chats among the attendees. Enjoy the small gallery below for an impression of the event. You can also browse the official Magento Live 2016 gallery for more images.
Magento Enterprise Cloud Session
Mark Lavelle – Magento CEO – Opening Session
Magento Global Ecosystem
Finding familiar faces
Alan Kent on Magento 2 Development
Networking Event at Magento Live Down Under
Meeting new Magento peeps
View of Darling Harbour from Cafe Del Mar
Can’t miss this tall guy! Fooman!
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